InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 6

IN REVIEW ONLINE
FEATURES
THE CRUSHING FUTILITY
OF HUMAN ACTION
Bernardo Bertolucci’s
THE CONFORMIST — 1
KICKING THE CANON
GUMMO — 4
FILM REVIEWS
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST
DANCE — 7
SOMEBODY I USED TO
KNOW — 8
SHARPER — 9
CONSECRATION &
HUESERA:— 11
YOUR PLACE OR MINE — 12
LET IT BE MORNING — 14
BABY RUBY — 16
CINEMA SABAYA — 17
ALL EYES OFF ME — 18
ALBUM REVIEWS
Julia Wu — 20
January 6, 2023
Volume 1, Issue 1

TITANIC
Courting Disaster
There’s a contradiction at
the heart of James Cameron’s
work, and the reason he’s such a
quintessential Hollywood figure is because of, not
despite, that contradiction. Cameron is an artist, but he’s
also a technician; cinema is an art, but also a technology. The
medium has become inextricable from commerce and popular culture partly because of
its unique expense, but also Hollywood has made a conscious effort to promote this idea: Going
all the way back to the silent era, the industry ballooned costs to maintain a feeling of
inaccessibility. When Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) went wildly over budget, that frustration was
spun into a virtue by an advertising campaign that called it “the first real million dollar picture,” sometimes citing the
specific cost of $1,104,000.

Cameron is part of a lineage, then. Avatar (2009) was developed
alongside the technology needed to make it, and its sequel cost
so much that, according to Cameron, it needed to become “the
third or fourth highest-grossing film in history” just to break
even. Yet both Avatar films are about escaping the world of
industry and capital, returning to a simpler, more natural mode
of living that’s rendered entirely in cutting-edge CGI; the
contradictions between art and technology are immediately
established at their most obvious but also at their most deeply
entangled.
On the other hand, Titanic (1997) establishes these two forces
clearly and separately in its opening scenes. First, there are the
researchers exploring the remains of the famous vessel — as
Cameron did himself, for his rendering — trying to understand
every forensic detail of the sinking. And then there’s Rose (Gloria
Stuart), the survivor now nearly 101 years old, who dryly remarks
after seeing the researchers' digital recreation: “Of course, the
experience of it was somewhat different.” It’s this human
perspective, rife with deep feeling, that turns a cold copy into
art; those emotions are really what bring the Titanic back to life
for the screen, not all of the precise technical detail.
But when Rose tells her story to the researchers, it doesn’t
exactly transcend that contradiction; her recreation, of course, is
still quite bound up in the conventions of Hollywood storytelling.
Titanic evokes other, “higher” arts both generally — in the broad
idea of Romeo & Juliet that it borrows — and specifically — as
when Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), the Romeo to Rose’s Juliet (Kate
Winslet, in the past), admires a Monet recreation. But both speak
to its insularity, and all that Jack can say about the painting is
that it has a great “use of color,” but without commenting on how
it is used or to what end. It’s the received wisdom about art
compressed through layers of Hollywood language. This
dedication to “movie-ness,” which runs deep in Cameron’s work,
might reflect a serious limit to his imagination, and at the very
least, caps what he’s able to do. It might seem novel here that the
man is the figure of fantasy for the woman rather than the other
way around, for example, but one character is still reduced to
their function in the emotional life of the other. It’s the same
structure with a few pieces superficially moved around.
Still, Cameron’s use of conventions and tropes is quite conscious,
and he’s found more use for them as his career has gone on
(though their use hasn’t quite reached the point of abstraction in

Titanic that it will in Avatar, where a character is never more than
a loose sketch of a certain type). This could quite easily be
regarded as a cynical move, as thinking in four-quadrant terms
and patronizing his audience, assuming they need the
comfortably familiar story at the core of Avatar to hold their hand
through its digital fantasy world. And while that might be true to
a certain extent, it’s largely because Cameron looks at
storytelling from the vantage of a technician: he builds with the
parts that have been proven to work. The fact that there is still
life in Titanic, that it feels less mechanical than its functional
parts, is surely in some part due to the chemistry between
DiCaprio and Winslet, but there’s more to it than that.
And this is the miracle of Hollywood: that art can form within,
against, the great commercial forces and highly formalized and
abstracted language (which was at an even further remove in the
so-called Golden Age, when Hollywood was creating more
masterpieces than ever). The famous “draw me like one your
French girls” scene evinces some of how this actually happens,
beyond pure mythology. The scene is both obviously sexual —
Rose asks Jack to draw her naked — but it’s also tasteful, one
breast obscured behind the sketchbook, so that it can play as an
awakening of sorts to (generally speaking) young boys without
upsetting parents' sensibilities. It’s also genuinely erotic for both
parties — and so too for the adults of both genders whom
Cameron imagines watching. Jack looks but can’t touch, and
Rose not only gets to be seen as desirable and beautiful, but also
gets to feel powerful through her initiation of the act, clearly the
one in control of the situation. All of these threads are playing to
different audiences at once, executed perfectly and woven
together seamlessly so that they create something like texture;
it’s an undeniably dense scene. So even if it’s targeted, to target is
to interpret desire, which in turn says something about people
and society at large, which is the scale such a scene is aiming
for.
Even though Cameron is attuned to his audience, though, he isn’t
bound by their expectations. The “French girls” scene ends with a
fade from a close-up of Rose as she lays naked to a close-up of
her in the present day, bringing an elderly person far closer to
sex than taboo usually allows. She even here expresses her
sexuality — it’s she who describes the scene as erotic. This isn’t
exactly something that a studio head or anyone who’s thinking
only in commercial terms would suggest — it’s likely not even

something they’d be capable of considering. This is just another
element of Cameron’s auteurist vision. But as we’ve stated, that
vision tends to stay primarily focused on the technical side of
things, and as such, his most obvious Titanic stand-in is lead
researcher Brock Lovett (played by Bill Paxton).
literal-mindedness — in Avatar, Pandora is compared to Oz, it’s
supposed to be an escape into the pure fantasy of movies, but
everything within it has a one-to-one real-world analog; the
religion is proven to be scientifically accurate, and that’s what
turns the ship of dreams into scrap metal.
“And this is the miracle of Hollywood: that art can form within, against, the
great commercial forces and highly formalized and abstracted
language… The famous “draw me like one your French girls” scene
evinces some of how this actually happens, beyond pure mythology.
Titanic is arguably told from Brock’s perspective as much as
Rose’s; her character offers an enrichment of his technical
understanding of events, the flashbacks being a combination of
the two. This is likely why there’s so much slippage in Rose’s
telling; from the beginning, she’s describing things that only Jack
would have seen, but that feels like a gentle enough stretching,
or at least a reasonable extrapolation of known narrative. It’s as
soon as the ship hits the iceberg that the film becomes
meaningfully untethered from her perspective, as it’s the details
of the sinking that truly fascinate Cameron. This imposes an
order on even the most chaotic moments: When the last bit of
ship slips beneath the water and hundreds of passengers are
crowded together, trying desperately not to drown, only a few
fleeting seconds are given to panic before Cameron cranes the
camera outward. Mathematical certainty hangs over everything,
slowly and precisely unwinding in the way that it already has; it’s
Cameron’s distance rather than Rose’s proximity that drives the
film, that makes it exciting and, at points, even terrifying.
From his earliest films, Cameron’s interests found him aligned
with strange forces. The Terminator (1984) is crafted exactly in
line with its lead character: ruthless, efficient, and violent (so it’s
not surprising he became the good guy in the sequel). This is
most concrete in Titanic, where the director’s passions, the
things that he’s most excited to commit to film, are quite literally
trying to crush that which is supposed to give them life: Rose
and the love story. Cameron is unable to escape his own
Underneath Titanic lies a tangible, powerful death drive. This is a
story of hubris, of a technical marvel too big and too ambitious.
It’s not only that the shipping company’s director (Jonathan
Hyde), for the sake of better press, pressured the Captain
(Bernard Hill) into making the ship go faster, which caused it to
sink; in some sense, it’s the idea itself that the Titanic was
unsinkable, most explicitly seen in its lack of lifeboats. They tried
to create something that transcended the material reality of its
construction, which is as good a description of art as any,
especially art made in a commercial context like Hollywood. The
biggest movie and the biggest ship, both courting disaster, both
flying too close to the sun (or, more aptly, sailing too close to the
ice). It’s an irresistible parallel, and one Cameron surely wouldn’t
miss in such a metatextual film. It’s easy to imagine his famously
huge ego seeing this as a challenge to overcome, but the film
can’t help but face failure by the facts of its story. That’s why the
scene where the musicians keep playing through the destruction
and the terror is so moving — it imagines the worst-case
scenario, where the ship or the movie starts to fall apart entirely,
and decides to keep going for its own sake.
Of course, this Titanic didn’t sink — the film became the biggest
Hollywood movie since Gone With The Wind (1938). And it’s maybe
for that reason that the excesses indulged in Cameron’s Avatar
films merely embrace the concept of contradiction without
demonstrating much urge to interrogate it or any sense of
possible failure. Yet some part of Cameron can’t quite let Titanic

go, as we’re here writing this on the eve of the film’s third
re-release, this time updated with 4K HDR and HFR. And in the
intervening years, he’s featured in several documentaries poring
back over the details, updating his model of the sinking with all
the discoveries made since (another was announced only a few
days ago). In the ironically titled Titanic: The Final Word with
James Cameron (2012), he and his team quite crassly speculate
on hypotheticals where everyone could have survived; Cameron’s
idea is to put them onto the iceberg since that wasn’t going to
sink. The event is stripped of all the weight and reality the film
was supposed to imbue the catastrophe with. At the end of
Titanic, Cameron’s stand-in Lovett says: “[For] three years I
thought about nothing but Titanic, but I never got it; I never let it
in,” yet he seems to be trying to push it back out.
There’s some sense that not only could Titanic fail, but that
maybe it did; and these contradictions can only lead to
implosion. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) is all about fluidity
and transformation: emotionally, as the Terminator learns to be
more human, and technologically, with the liquid metal villain
demonstrating the new possibilities of CGI. But even then, the
Terminator can only understand why people feel — he can’t feel
himself, and there’s no promise that the apocalyptic future that
these characters have come back from has been prevented, even
though the material conditions that created it have been
changed. Cameron could only locate a small glimmer of hope.
And so in Titanic, which is bound by history, trying to reach back
and in some way bring this long-dead past back to life seems
totally insurmountable.
Maybe that’s because Cameron holds himself to the standards of
Hollywood, limiting himself to what works within a false
hegemony. But by speaking through that language — and drawing
attention to it through the friction of the framing and central
story — he shows its limits; he shows a film fighting against itself
and losing. The past escaping into the void. The film's final shot
starts as a POV, winding through the Titanic, toward Jack, as if
we’ve finally gone back. But then Rose walks in front of the
camera, and we’re put at a remove, showing whose perspective
we’re seeing. And anyway, this isn’t even a memory but a dying
dream, one that soon enough fades into white forever. For
someone who sees the world as literally as Cameron does, there
is a deeper tragedy to the end of living memory. Experience and
emotion exist in the cracks of material reality, and so once they
are gone, they are profoundly so — there is no wreckage left to
search through.— ESMÉ HOLDEN

Like a lot of American enterprises of today, the Grammy Awards
are both considered high prestige and met with low expectations.
We all know that they’re going to disappoint us — just as surely as
the sun will rise, the Recording Academy will get things terribly
wrong — and yet we tune in anyway because… well, we’ll take
what we can get. Naturally, the Grammys got a lot of things
wrong this year. But let’s begin with a few things that they got
right.
GRAMMYS
Title title title
First, this Grammys skirted the major catastrophes. Can you
imagine if Machine Gun Kelly won Best Rock Album? Or if DJ
Khaled won Album of the Year? Apologies to Khaled, but he owes
all six of his nominations to that one Jay-Z verse. (The Recording
Academy didn’t believe in him, but hey, at least God did.) We could
debate whether Bonnie Raitt’s “Just Like That” was really the
Song of the Year, but it’s probably even easier to agree that
GAYLE’s “abcdefu” was a complete blip and profoundly lucky just
to be nominated. (We can even pretend it never was!) Beyoncé
rightfully took home Best R&B Song for “CUFF IT,” a timeless
track that really deserved more nominations. Nile Rodgers —
whose slick guitar work elevates the song from bop to classic
bop — accepted the award on Bey’s behalf (as even queens aren’t
immune to L.A. traffic). In his speech, Rodgers described “CUFF
IT” as “the most organic thing that ever happened to me.” That’s
saying something, given how many hits the man has under his
belt.
Sunday night’s ceremony also saw Beyoncé become the most
decorated Grammy winner of all time, nabbing four additional
trophies to bring her lifetime count to a record 32. In addition to
Best R&B Song, she took home awards for Best Traditional R&B
Performance, Best Dance/Electronic Album, and Best
Dance/Electronic Recording. These made for historic wins, but
the night may still have been somewhat deflating for her: she
failed to secure Album of the Year (an award she’s never won,
despite three nominations), losing the prestigious prize to Harry
Styles’ far inferior Harry’s House. (Only Bey could make history
and still get snubbed in the same evening.) In fact, of her 32
Grammys, only is for a major all-genre category: her 2010 Song of
the Year win for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).”

THE
HARDER
THEY
COME
Perry
Henzell
The post-independence era was a turbulent
one for the small island nation of Jamaica.
Having gained freedom from the British in 1962,
the following decade of economic growth was also
marked by increased inequality and escalating urban
violence. It’s against this backdrop that writer-director Perry
Henzell and co-writer Trevor Rhone decided to bring the story of
notorious Jamaican outlaw Ivanhoe Martin — known by his nickname Rhyging
(the Jamaican Patois word for "raging") — to the screen. After being shot dead by police
In 1948, Rhyging, who is often described as the original "rude boy," grew into a sort of folk
legend for many poor Jamaicans who found in him a rebellious antihero who stood up against the
colonial and capitalist order — a complex admiration not dissimilar to the one enjoyed by early-20th-century
European illegalists like Jules Bonnot.
Henzell and Rhone's script — which began life under the working title Rhyging before they settled onthe implicit fatalism of The Harder
They Come — updated the rudy's story to the 1970s, and the two decided to cast reggae singer Jimmy Cliff in the lead role. Cliff, who
had no prior acting experience outside of school plays, had seen his star rise throughout the back half of the '60s, and his 1970 single
"Vietnam" even earned the praise of Bob Dylan, who called it the best protest song he’d ever heard. The musician's natural charisma in
the lead role wouldn't be the only thing to contribute to the first Jamaican feature film's lasting legacy, however, as its iconic
soundtrack — featuring tracks from Desmond Dekker, Toots and the Maytals, and Cliff himself — is widely credited with popularizing
reggae music internationally.
Composed for the film, Cliff's infectious title song formed a defiant yet grim counterpoint to the aspirational "You Can Get It If You
Really Want," which plays over the opening credits, anticipating the tragic end to the badman protagonist's nihilistic rebellion. "So as
sure as the sun will shine / I'm gonna get my share now, what's mine / And then the harder they come / The harder they fall, one and all,"
goes the song's chorus, the fictionalized Ivanhoe Martin — "Ivan" for short — unwittingly prophesying his eventual downfall during a

ecording session. But like the films that inspired it — Django, which makes an appearance during a rowdy screening in Kingston; The
Wild Bunch; Bonnie and Clyde — The Harder They Come trades in stylishly gritty action fireworks, even as it anticipates the bleak
fascination it, or more specifically its main character, will inspire. For instance, when the fugitive Ivan attempts to gun down his
former boss, José (Carl Bradshaw), chasing him through a Kingston slum, he is quickly surrounded by laughing children, eager to get a
glimpse of the charismatic desperado.
Even more obvious is Henzell's framing during the Django screening: youthful, curious faces, illuminated by the silver screen, look on in
awe as Franco Nero's titular character guns down rows of menacing, red-hooded enemies with a machine gun, collectively erupting in
cheers as his adversaries' dead bodies hit the dusty desert ground. When an audience member gets a little too caught up in the
narrative and worries out loud about Django's survival, the brash José mockingly asks him, "You think hero can dead 'til the last reel?"
— a glib seen-it-all-ism that, in a moment of sly subversion, will prove to be just as prophetic as the title track.
Ivan's transformation from awkward "country bwoy" to murderous gunslinger is a radical one. Arriving in Kingston with wide-eyed
naïveté and half a dozen bags — the entirety of his earthly possessions — he is immediately robbed blind by a vulturous street vendor
and forced to face his brusque, city-dwelling mother with nothing but vague hopes of making it as a singer. Unable to stay with her, he
eventually finds a job doing menial work for a Christian minister (Basil Keane), but soon begins pursuing the preacher's young female
charge, Elsa (Janet Bartley). After spending most of his time reading comic books and issues of Playboy, not to mention using the
church to rehearse his secular tunes, the bohemian Ivan is dismissed, and an argument with a former colleague escalates into a knife
fight, transforming Ivan's eyes from mellow and friendly to gleefully sadistic for the first time.
After being sentenced to a brutal whipping by a judge for slashing his opponent's face, Ivan becomes fully determined to make it as a
reggae artist, but exploitative music industry practices, as well as a resentful record executive, move him to accept a side hustle as a
drug runner. The runs go smoothly at first, but when an approaching police officer triggers a flashback to the corporal punishment he
received, the traumatized Ivan guns down the cop, effectively sealing his fate. It's not only the moment that gives birth to the near-

mythological black hat, a kind of trauma response which leaves
the charmingly gawky Ivan behind to make way for the legendary
dual-wielding gunman, but also where the film itself transforms
from a neorealist travelogue into a guns-blazing crime thriller.
though he was widely reported on as he shot his way into folk
hero status, photographs of Rhyging are rare, and the few that
exist have deteriorated to the point of indecipherability, his
image largely living on in the cultural imagination.
Before the third-act eruption, The Harder They Come simmers
with rich textures and barely-contained sensuality, perhaps best
exemplified by a sequence during which the religious ecstasy of
a church congregation resembles the more carnal ecstasy of sex
— sweaty churchgoers contort their faces as they shake, twist,
and even tumble over in suggestive elation. Elsa, in the midst of
the wildly gyrating mass, suddenly has blissful sexual fantasies
of herself and Ivan, their naked bodies covered in the wet of a
surrounding ocean. It's a provocative scene, one where lust
seems to trigger something akin to a spiritual vision, and the
sparkle and shine of her daydream lend the images a
paradisiacal quality, the two lovers becoming Adam and Eve-like
figures in the young romantic's mind. But even the film's sexuality
becomes more lurid following Ivan's inciting murder. Far removed
from Elsa's picturesque visions, Ivan's newly-discovered
ruthlessness leads him into a tryst with José's girlfriend — before
engaging the police in a deadly shootout dressed only in his
underwear. In fact, even though he's on the run, his hedonistic
hunger grows so insatiable that he throws caution to the wind,
and instead opts to steal cars, buy fancy clothes, and even pose
for a photoshoot. Pistols in hand, Ivan swaggers in front of the
camera, mimicking Spaghetti Western hard-asses and building
his own myth in the process.
The photoshoot plays an interesting role in the film. For one, it
epitomizes just how brazen Ivan has become, refusing to lay low
and later sending his stylish portraits to newspapers. For
another, it interrogates history, self-invention, and the very
medium of photography itself. Ivan flaunts his elusiveness by,
paradoxically, making himself more visible — he spray-paints "I
WAS HERE BUT I DISAPPEAR" all over Kingston, taunting the police
— mirroring contemporary news reports of Rhyging's criminal
activities, dramatically describing him as a "phantom killer" with
a propensity for disappearing as quickly as he appeared. Even
Cliff's portrayal almost functions as yet another instance of
Rhyging suddenly reemerging after having, in a sense,
"disappeared into the dark," as the Kingston-based Daily Gleaner
so aptly described his seemingly miraculous vanishing act after
committing a murder. The dissemination of images has been an
important element through which history is understood, and
there's a lot of ink to be spilled about how these processes tend
to favor certain groups of people over others — photographs of
Billy the Kid or Jesse James are far better preserved, their moral
character being no less dubious than Rhyging's. As such, The
Harder They Come stands not just as a fiery crime film, but also
as a necessary corrective to a neglected photographic history of
Jamaica.
“[This] callback to the
grindhouse flicks of the ‘70s
offers up the most respectful
portrait of sex workers the
big screen has seen in ages.
The film was a sensation upon its Jamaican release, with
showtimes regularly being overrun by enthusiastic filmgoers
who, in an era of worldwide political upheaval and widespread
anti-government sentiment, were thrilled to see the famous
criminal finally come to life in a way he hadn't been allowed to
before. Even though the impact of its soundtrack has somewhat
overshadowed Henzell's debut, it hasn't lost an iota of its radical
power. Henzell himself has downplayed Rhyging's status as a folk
hero — in a 1988 television interview, he said, "[Rhyging] was just
seen as a guy who created a lot of excitement… He's a character,
and people recognized that" — but his visceral take on the story
nonetheless ensured that the myth will live on for generations to
come. — FRED BARRETT

HARD BOILED
John Woo
For this writer, a personal cinematic pet peeve is when characters fire guns only for the bullets to seem to dissipate, never hitting
anything. John Woo is, perhaps more than any other filmmaker from his generation, aware that bullets destroy shit. Every time a gun
goes off, walls erupt, windows explode, bodies are ripped up and go flying — ridiculous, yes, but there’s a weight here, a sense of
gravity, of consequence. This sense of consequence is why the insane action of his Hong Kong films remains poignant while most
modern blockbusters feel artificial. Hard Boiled, the absolute apogee of action cinema, is riddled with bullets, shredding bodies and
erupting into oddly pleasing sparks like fireworks as they slam into doors, walls, the husks of cars — splatter and sparkles.
"Give a guy a gun, he thinks he's superman. Give him two and he thinks he's God." Hard Boiled is chockablock with guys with guns, and
even more with gunshots. Here, the Godly Chow Yun-fat stars as an indefatigable police sergeant while a baby-faced Tony Leung
Chiu-wai plays an intrepid undercover cop who has risen high in the ranks as a triad assassin. Across the film’s two hours, their paths
meet and pleat until they are, in the end, inextricable, uniting to shoot it out with seemingly hundreds of bad guys with big guns,
destroying a hospital but saving the day — and a bunch of babies.
Woo was one of the last masters of analog spectacle, an artist from an era before computers made the impossible boring and
depleted action cinema of anything tactile. Woo's camera is swoony and swervy, moving curvaceously, the director switching things
up, shot to shot, with the most dexterous editing in cinema. Today, in a post-Wick world, the decently skilled directors working in the
genre utilize the medium and employ wide shots with only rare cutting, showcasing the choreography and capping things off with CG
blood. Woo cuts a lot. In his sequences, geography is logical, bullets follow their trajectory and hit what they're aimed at, bodies fall
and stay there. Take, for instance, the scene in Hard Boiled where Chow slides down a railing while dual-wielding guns and shooting

enemies. Woo doesn't film this to show off the stunt, but instead employs a staggering amount of cuts — almost 20 times in 20
seconds. Chow is smooth in this sequence while surrounded by bodies hitting the floor; sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, always
violently.
But Woo is a master of melodrama as much as he is of action. As with his lyrical and elegiac The Killer and his later heroic Hollywood
efforts Broken Arrow and the flat-out awesome Face/Off, and even in his unfairly-derided Mission: Impossible II (which, while neutered,
is still replete with Woo-ist touches), there's a theme of duality, of partnership and friendship and the depths of bromance, on which
the extraordinary set-pieces of Hard Boiled are founded. Chow and Leung have better chemistry than any leads in any romantic
comedy of the last 20 years, with riotous raillery and a palpable sense of unity and determination to get the baddies. (It’s easy to go
back and forth between The Killer, which is more soulful and tragic, and Hard Boiled, which is a triumphant, more formally daring
affair. In true Woo fashion, they are an inextricable pair, two embodiments of the same passions and vision.)
Woo’s films are also always concerned with morality, but there are no cumbersome lessons; the juxtaposition between cop and
criminal, good and evil, redemption and damnation is gunmetal gray. All of which is to say, there's poetry in Woo’s violence, as when
Chow plugs a baby's ears with cotton and lights up so many men, all of their blasted bodies bursting into blood and viscera as the
baby gazes with gleaming goo-goo eyes. So while Chow can deliver a stony-eyed glare as well as anyone, Woo unburdens his films of
the self-severity and stoicism of modern action. Instead, he makes friendship and masculinity and morality and heroism and the
ravaging of human bodies by metal projectiles oddly, alluringly beautiful. — GREG CWIK

FILM REVIEWS
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE
Steven Soderbergh
“What are your plans for Act Three?” asks one character of
Channing Tatum’s Mike about the show he’s directing in Magic
Mike’s Last Dance, the third overall and second Steven
Soderbergh-directed entry in the male-stripper series created by
Soderbergh in collaboration with writer Reid Carolin and (in this
case) producer Gregory Jacobs. The reply? “We’re gonna have
one.” In one of the most self-reflexive films of Soderbergh’s
career, this line stands out for its honesty about both the
aimlessness and the underdog charm of the project. The film —
Soderbergh’s first to be released in theaters after five
consecutive streaming releases — is rife with anxieties about the
pressures of pleasing both crowds and producers, and the result
is a work whose eccentricities are both frustrating and
fascinating.
Last Dance opens with Mike bartending a fundraising event held
by wealthy, emotionally fragile recent divorceé Maxandra
Mendoza (Salma Hayek). Mike’s furniture business has fallen
victim to the latent economic anxieties that have always
marked this series. After catching wind of Mike’s former
profession, Maxandra entices him into a private after-hours
dance that both sets the film on its path and, unfortunately, is
where the movie peaks. The promise of the Magic Mike films is
largely that they tap into pleasures that the American cinema
has all but left behind — sex appeal, yes, but also the capturing
of physical performance, the expressiveness of seeing movie
stars do things with their bodies that most of us can’t (“A body
in motion is always sexy as fuck,” goes one line). The movie is at
its best when hewing closer to that promise, and the extended,
intimate pas de deux between these two middle-aged sex
symbols is where it does so most memorably.
It’s the aftermath of that scene, in which Hayek convinces
Tatum to follow her to London for a month with a mysterious
promise of employment, where things start to get rocky. In a
story apparently inspired by the genesis of Tatum’s real-life
Magic Mike London stage show, Maxandra enlists Mike to direct
a male stripper revue in the stuffy West End theater left to her
in the divorce. Soderbergh can always be counted on to
attempt a new narrative experiment or genre riff with each
picture, and the “let’s put on a show” musicals of the ‘30s — Gold
Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade — are a fitting inspiration.
Outside the theater, however, the movie shifts into something
few would have expected from the franchise: a gentle, languid
family drama.
As the emotional attachment between Mike and Maxandra
grows, her precocious teen daughter Zadie (Jemelia George, her
first screen role) and mysterious butler Victor (Ayub Khan-Din,
terrific in his first since Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get
Laid in 1987) emerge as the film’s two major

FILM REVIEWS
supporting characters. The movie’s insistence on low-keyness
feels refreshing — this is surely one of the lowest-stakes studio
releases in recent years — if not particularly rewarding.
Soderbergh can’t be blamed for not attempting to recreate the
nonstop bacchanalia that has made XXL something of a modern
classic, but Last Dance too often hits the exact pitfalls that film
eschewed. Soderbergh is at his best when his material expands
the range of his talents — here, he feels constrained by a script
that, worse than being fairly undercooked, plays to the opposite
of his talents.
The family drama feels strangely thin and unmotivated — we
wonder why we’re spending so much time with these people,
and Last Dance struggles to give us much of an answer.
Director/cinematographer/editor Soderbergh also feels
stylistically reined in here — the last time he absconded to
Europe for a sequel, he synthesized the continent’s aesthetic
influences for the bravura formal achievement of Ocean’s
Twelve. Despite his career-long inspiration from the likes of
Roeg, Boorman, and Lester, the London setting doesn’t
invigorate in the same way. Most disappointingly, the treatise
on female desire and empowerment that runs through the
series gets its most didactic treatment here, spelled out in
dialogue or in Zadie’s book-report narration on the societal
function of dance rather than embodied in its performances.
“[This] callback to the
grindhouse flicks of the ‘70s
offers up the most respectful
portrait of sex workers the
big screen has seen in ages.
It’s telling that this movie finds Mike moving, somewhat,
from the role of performer to director, as Last Dance is
largely about the struggle to create art in a world hostile to
it, where reliance on a wealthy benefactor is the only
option left to the artist. Indeed, the movie’s most potent
wish fulfillment may be Soderbergh’s own — imagine if you
got your money from Salma Hayek instead of the likes of
David Zaslav. The show, when it comes, is worth the wait,
heartwarming and dazzling in equal measure, and topped
with a truly perilous-feeling, rain-drenched duet from
Tatum and dancer Kylie Shea. In moments like these, the
talent involved becomes undeniable — it’s nice to be in the
hands of a director who actually knows how to fill out a
widescreen frame, or how to judiciously employ handheld
or close-ups for emotional effect. Tatum, likewise, once
again proves himself to be one of the most talented,
reliable, and selfless stars of his generation. In the end,
however, the diminishing returns of Magic Mike’s Last Dance
may be its most lasting commentary on the worlds of art
and commerce — one just keeps trying to get the magic
back however one can, until the compromises and
disappointments met along the way become the story
itself. — BRAD HANFORD
DIRECTOR: Steven Soderbergh; CAST: Channing Tatum, Salma
Hayek, Caitlin Gerard, Gavin Spokes; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner
Brothers; IN THEATERS: February 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW
Dave Franco
A Type A careerist finds her life spinning out of control after the
man she’s long harbored feelings for announces his intentions of
marrying a younger woman, inspiring her to recklessly insert
herself into their relationship to try and split the happy couple
apart. She feigns friendship with the bride-to-be, while secretly
undermining the couple every chance she gets – and the whole
thing explodes, spectacularly, the weekend of the wedding. Fans
of romantic comedies will likely recognize this as the premise of
1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, which has now been ported over,
with only a handful of tweaks, to the new Amazon-premiering
Somebody I Used to Know, from actor-turned-director Dave
Franco. It’s a bit of theft the film even cops to with Kiersey
Clemons’ Cassidy, the younger bride in this love triangle, asking
Alison Brie’s Ally if she’s not, in fact, attempting her own version

FILM REVIEWS
of the Julia Roberts film after the latter elbows her way into the
wedding party. It’s an acknowledgment on the film’s part of how
derivative this all is, but also a slight upending of expectations.
Everyone on screen seems to recognize Ally’s motives, they just
refuse to intervene, and even humor her attempts to sow chaos.
Is it merely apathy on the film’s part or recognition that, perhaps,
this union isn’t meant to go forward?
Aspiring documentarian Ally left her hometown of Leavenworth,
Washington (a quaint community modeled after a German village)
for Los Angeles ten years earlier and, like so many before her,
she sold out for the relative ease and quick money of producing
reality television. After the show she created – some kind of
cooking competition where everyone sleeps with one another – is
abruptly canceled by the network, she tucks tail, retreating to
Leavenworth to try and figure out her next step and get some
TLC from her mother, Libby (Julie Haggerty). While drinking her
sorrows away at a local bar, Ally has a chance encounter with
Sean (Jay Ellis), the guy she spurned for her big city dreams, and
they immediately fall back into old habits, which here amounts to
public drunkenness and harassing the town’s reindeer population.
It’s the kind of magical evening that finds them enjoying one
another’s company well past sunrise,
yet, after Ally initiates a kiss at the end of the night, she senses
Sean tensing up. Has she misread the situation or is there
something else?
The “something else” is Cassidy, Sean’s fiancée, who he failed to
mention the whole time he and Ally were out all night,
shotgunning beer and liquid cheese. Ally inadvertently crashes
the pre-wedding festivities after stopping by Sean’s house and
feels embarrassment and confusion: why would Sean not
mention he’s days away from getting married… unless he still has
feelings for her? Improbably roped into serving as videographer
for the wedding by Sean’s family (she does make documentaries,
after all), Ally's presence only puts further strain on Sean and
Cassidy’s relationship. Cassidy’s not an idiot and recognizes the
disruptive influence of having Sean’s ex hovering around, but she
treats the whole thing like a game of chicken, playing things cool
while waiting to see who’s going to blink first.
The central question of why anyone would invite this sort of
temptation into an already fraught occasion like a wedding is
never directly answered, and while some of that is merely
shoddiness on the film’s part, it does lend the film a useful level
of tension, providing an undercurrent of uneasiness to otherwise

FILM REVIEWS
rote sitcom hijinks. Far from an innocent here, Sean repeatedly
sends out mixed signals: Outwardly distancing himself from Ally
while failing to intervene once it becomes clear her presence is a
distraction, then sneaking off so they can talk about his fears
and anxieties, the stuff he can’t bring up with Cassidy. A late
revelation even calls into question how much bumping into Ally
that first night was actually happenstance on his part. Yet, in
keeping with its overall approach, which can either be
interpreted as generosity or indecisiveness, the film refuses to
come down on Sean as either a ditherer or a cad. Like seemingly
everyone here, he’s just working through some things.
That lack of clarity is most noticeable with Ally, whose actions
are outwardly psychotic (in the grand tradition of The Onion
headline “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life [Person]
Arrested”), but the film is ultimately too timid to offer much of an
opinion about her either. Alternating between Machiavelian
schemer (she searches out Cassidy’s parents and surreptitiously
invites them to the wedding even though they’ve been cut out of
her life for good reason) and a sympathetic ear for both Sean and
Cassidy, it can be difficult to track Ally’s objectives on a
scene-by-scene basis. Does Ally actually love Sean enough to
break up his marriage, or does he just remind her of a time when
she had hope for her future? Have her years producing reality TV
hardened her to messy human emotions and rendered her thirsty
for artificial drama? And is this all merely a passing fad, not
coincidentally timed to a lull in her career?
Co-written by Franco and Brie (married in real life, the actress
previously appearing in the filmmaker’s Airbnb thriller, The
Rental), the film is caught between good-natured bawdiness and
touchy-feely earnestness. In any given moment, we might get a
running gag about Ally walking in on her 60-something mother
having sex, or the film indulging Brie’s professed love of nudism,
or a heart-to-heart about Sean’s need for control stemming from
his abandonment issues, or the suggestion that Cassidy’s desire
to remain on tour with her rock band mirrors Ally’s own
professional aspirations. And the film’s unwillingness to go for
blood, always quickly absolving its characters of their relative
transgressions, ends up leaving a lot of meat on the bone. Not
vicious enough to work as cringe comedy yet too irreverent and
loaded up with groan-worthy pop culture references to be truly
bittersweet, Somebody I Used to Know – like the characters
themselves – just feels perpetually torn. — ANDREW DIGNAN
DIRECTOR: Dave Franco; CAST: Alison Brie, Jay Ellis, Kiersey
Clemons, Danny Pudi, Haley Joel Osment; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon
Prime Video; STREAMING: February 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
SHARPER
Benjamin Caron
In the course of that rich history of films about con artists, the
appeal has almost always been to watch largely amoral
professionals execute their perfect plans in order to strip some
rich jerk of their money. What Sharper presupposes is… maybe it
isn’t? The result is a mostly diverting couple of hours, but one
unfortunately marred by the fact that it’s all so bizarrely square.
The film is broken into chapters, each of which, sort of, focus on
an individual character. First, we have Tom (Justice Smith), who’s
working at a bookstore when he’s taken with one of his
customers, Sandra (Briana Middleton). After a requisite
meet-cute and a nice date (plus an entire opening sequence —
probably accidentally, but still — that plays almost as a carbon
copy of Clarence and Alabama meeting in True Romance), there’s
a lovely montage showing their burgeoning romance. And, as it
turns out, Tom also comes from money — a lot of it.
We then bounce back in time to see Sandra’s introduction to Max
(Sebastian Stan). He lifts her up out of addiction and parole
officer problems, training her to become an expert confidence
trickster. At this point, we’re also introduced to Madeline
(Julianne Moore), who might be Max’s lover but is instead
pretending to be his mother. You see, she’s dating Richard
Hobbes (John Lithgow), a big wheel at some hedge fund who also
happens to be Tom’s father. You see where this is all headed: The
whole thing is perfectly cromulent. The time-jumping narrative
helps Sharper to maintain a modicum of suspense throughout,

FILM REVIEWS
and all the actors are game in their respective roles. Stan and
Moore, in particular, have some actual chemistry; it’s just a
shame that they’re sidelined for large chunks of the story.
Lithgow also oozes just the right amount of ick, but he also exits
the narrative too early and leaves behind Middleton and Smith, a
pair who simply aren’t interesting enough on their own either as
a precious dupe or an audience-surrogate tour guide to the world
of the long con.
ddd
There’s competently executed tension here, but director
Benjamin Caron ultimately doesn’t have a ton up his sleeve. A
graduate from years of television, there are the usual
prestige-TV stylistic tricks — shallow focus, flourishy
monochrome scenes, etc. — but it’s rarely surprising. And at his
worst, on a couple of occasions Caron even gets right in the way
of his actors, such as in a brief scene of Moore and Stan having a
celebratory dance in an empty bar that would have been far
more effective if it wasn’t ill-advisedly broken up by coverage.
Even setting all that frustrating technical craft aside, though,
Sharper fails not because it’s generic, but rather because its
attempt at a smidgen of novelty is so damn boring in execution.
Who comes to a caper movie for a story of someone gaining a
conscience and feeling sorry about conning people? The
approach is anathemic to the subgenre and sets expectations it
has no intention of meeting, not to mention it’s simply no fun at
all. — MATT LYNCH
DIRECTOR: Benjamin Caron; CAST: Julianne Moore, Sebastian
Stan, Justice Jesse Smith, John Lithgow; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple
TV+ / A24; IN THEATERS: February 10; STREAMING: February 17;
RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
CONSECRATION & HUESERA
Christopher Smith | Michelle Garza Cervera

FILM REVIEWS
OLD REVIEWS NEW RELEASES
SERIOUSLY RED
Gracie Otto
“Filled to the brim with a host of classic Dolly tunes and boasting
a delightful central performance by Boylan, Seriously Red puts a
new spin on the oft-told tale of finding oneself by letting its
protagonist quite literally lose herself in another role. Set
amongst a kooky cast of celebrity wannabes — including Rose
Byrne as an Elvis impersonator and Bobby Cannavale as a former
Neil Diamond — the film wears its outsized heart on its sleeve,
but its earnestness thankfully never comes across as cloying or
insincere.” — MATTIE LUCAS
DIRECTOR: Gracie Otto; CAST: Krew Boylan, Rose Byrne, Bobby
Cannavale; DISTRIBUTOR: Gravitas Ventures; IN THEATERS &
STREAMING: February 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
ATTACHMENT
Gabriel Bier Gislason
DIRECTOR: Gabriel Bier Gislason; CAST: Sofie Gråbøl, David
Dencik, Ellie Kendrick, Josephine Park; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder;
STREAMING: February 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
THE BLUE CAFTAN
Maryam Touzani
SWALLOWED
Carter Smith
“The film moves so languidly that any potentially devastating
emotional blows have been softened: The first time Halim and
Youssef even begin to verbally profess their love for one another,
we’re already halfway through the coy film. One could call it being
deliberate with your pacing, but since not much has really
occurred beforehand — other than what took about two
sentences to sum up — it’s more Touzani stalling the drama
before it actually has time to begin complicating itself.” — PAUL
ATTARD
DIRECTOR: Carter Smith; CAST: Jena Malone, Cooper Koch, Jose
Colon; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: February 14;
RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
DIRECTOR: Maryam Touzani; CAST: Lubna Azabal, Saleh Bakri,
Ayoub Messioui; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS:
February 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.
16

ALBUM REVIEWS
IDFK
Julia Wu
Simply put: Julia Wu has established
herself as one of the most consistent
artists of the decade so far. The
Australian-Chinese singer-songwriter has
put out an album every year since 2019
(and more before that) — the mixed
Mandarin and English 5 am in 2019, its
entirely English version 5 pm in 2020, 2622
in summer 2021, and now IDFK in winter
2022 — and each of them has been a
smooth, groovy R&B delight. Highlights
during that run include the indelible hook
of “One in a Billion,” the hazy “Sunset,” and
the cozy, rainy day single Better,” plus
many more tracks that fully vibe without
sacrificing their character.
IDFK’s title might seem to suggest an
under-promise, but its content is that of an
excellent R&B record that easily lives up to
the standard of Wu’s last few projects. “If
Only You,” for instance, is the exact kind of
song that tends to grace the middle
section of a Wu tracklist, but it’s so velvety
and honestly sung that the familiarity
justifies itself. Other tracks do try styles
that she hasn’t explored quite as much: On
opener “I Can’t,” Wu tosses off the line “I
could be everything that you’ll ever need”
over refreshingly dancey production, and
“The
One,” with its funky electric guitar and
disco synth shimmers, is one of the
artist’s most upbeat songs to date. In
contrast, single “Late Night Cruising” is
slow and sultry, vocals drawn out around
the bends in the road: “Make a little wish,
I’ll take you up high / Breaking through the
clouds, we’ll feel the sun rise.”
The title of the eponymous track
downplays its lyrical content, where Wu
reaches up into her falsetto over muted
electric guitar to declare that she “feel[s]
like staring into you forever.” A lot of her
songs capture this sensation, that of
being caught up in feelings for another
person to the point where the music
communicates almost a physical texture
being caught up in feelings for another
person to the point where the music
communicates almost a physical texture
to her desire. With the exception of the
bouncy, slightly more cynical “Retail
Therapy,” the tracks on IDFK are focused
on attraction and romance, and that’s one
of the reasons why, despite its consistent
sound, Wu’s music doesn’t feel stale. Even
when the hooks are breezy, her songs are
deeply felt, and her vocal performances
operate as such passionate confessions
that they make every line feel important.
It’s no surprise, then, that the overall
production on the album is warm, packed
with lush vocal layering, and neatly
balancing elegance and casual
conversation. IDFK may only consist of
eight tracks, but it accomplishes a lot in
that limited space. There are a few
immediate discography highlights, some
familiar tracks that ground the set as a
distinctly Julia Wu project, and enough
quality and variety to hopefully pull in new
fans too. Not every, and nary a, prolific
musician is able to reliably pair quantity
with quality — so when an artist does
manage to deliver every time, even if only
over a period of time, it’s even more
important for us listeners to celebrate. —
KAYLA BEARDSLEE
LABEL: ChynaHouse Digital Co. RELEASE
DATE: December 2